Global Humanist Shoptalk

Consumers sometimes get a bad rap. People making purchases for their families are often trying to do the best they can to juggle value and quality while also being mindful of the most recent social issues news media tells them to prioritize. In this episode, I reflect on some old and new ways in which labeling and company gimmicks to look eco-conscious obscure the deeper problem: the fact that the...

A change in cultural context can transform how one thinks about the most innocuous everyday items. That was certainly the case for me with respect to eggs, when I moved from Canada to Colombia and fell into a complete rethink about how our options as consumers and community members are both constructed and constricted by the societies in which we live.

In this episode, we reflect on one of the key indicators of familial wellness and a healthy childhood. It's not money exactly , but it's related! For families living with financial precarity, there is often far less opportunity to create supportive domestic environments, and that strife is felt and borne by the kids involved. If we want to do better by the next generation, we need to start advocat...

Sometimes the best way to move forward is to think about how we've responded to issues in the past. In this episode of Global Humanist Shoptalk, I reflect on the early-2000s trend cycle for quinoa as a super-food with key global-activist intersections. The aim isn't to criticize any of us for leaping onto a bandwagon, and then reckoning after the fact with the deeper complexities of any food econo...

In this episode, we talk about one of the most delicate and vital issues of our time: how we address our mental health crises as a society. While neoliberalism has made a full industry out of wellness, is it really addressing the underlying reasons that so many people are having the same problems coping with our broken world? How can we reframe the problem to arrive at more comprehensive solutions...

Everyday objects like the sidewalk, and the routines we've built around them, can be sites of reflection on how we've built our societies, and for whom. In this episode, I reflect on how moving from Canada to Colombia compelled me to think differently about mobility, and the different priorities built into cityscapes on the ground. What assumptions and possibilities do you see, when travelling the...

In this first main-season episode, we reflect on the role that pronunciation plays in manifesting a deeper curiosity about our world, and empathy for others in it. I will always try my best to pronounce the names of people and places "properly", but is our choice to pronounce the names of other countries the same way that locals do always a mark of moral "superiority"? Or is there a level of dehum...

In this podcast opener, I talk about the humanist aims of this series, and explore why learning to hold ideas in calmer tension is an important counterpoint to how we "do" discourse in much of our world. Instead of focussing on the "hook", a highly cynical storytelling device with a fairly recent and context-driven history, what if we practised a more patient and reflective way of engaging with to...